Gaza Genocide: The dark side of Friedman's Free Market Economics

The so called unseen hand of the markets was supposed to create prosperity for the whole world. So Bill Clinton told us all not to worry as good paying middle class manufacturing jobs left this country like blood flows from a cut artery, because the new high wage high tech future was coming for America. It never came and those of us who went out and borrowed the money to further our training for this future suddenly found all that training priced us right out of the job market.

For older experienced well trained Americans instead of a secure retirement with dignity and respect, we were now a disposable commodity in a global economy based on cheap labor not quality or ability. The notion of how we dispose of disposable commodities is important for understanding why those in power so willingly accept genocide as acceptable today.

Friedman promised freedom in his book Capitalism and Freedom and a very few have achieved the ultimate freedom of being above the law that is ruthlessly enforced on 99% of the worlds population. This falls under the phony rubric of too big to fail as in banks, and fabulously wealthy people, and now we are learning that even some nations are too big to fail.

Which brings us to Gaza and Israels engagement in ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population from what once belonged entirely to them. What Freidman and his Chicago School of Economics disciples never let the world know is that when people become commodotized, genocide is no longer a crime against humanity it is just another market correction.

With Bill and Hillary Clinton we learned that some people are too big to fail so thus they are above prosecution for crimes they committed because after all they committed them not out of malice but for all of our benefits and their illegal behavior was done in the name of global prosperity for all. Thus Bill never even had to face impeachment for giving technology away to the Chinese in exchange for all the cheap labor corporate America wanted to dump middle class Americans for. You see it was once treason to intentionally destroy America's economy for profit until the wonders of NAFTA begat the giant jobs vacuum that has left America a third world extraction colony in so many places.

With W. and Obama we learned that whole companies such as J. P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs were too big to fail while the entire middle class in America was deemed too small to succeed. Yes Friedman's ideas of freedom required us to accept that banks and other financial businesses, such as investment companies, could engage in wholesale fraud, insider trading, and forgery but they were so vital to America that we the people must cough up 16 trillion to bail them out from their illegality while the middle class was allowed to start failing because of this fraud and illegality. We were told that criminal acts shouldn't be criminal acts because after all this blocked the free functioning of the markets and the faith based fraud that given absolute freedom or anarchy, depending on your view, the unseen hand of the markets would remake the world in setting the real value of goods, services, and people in the process and because this was the free functioning market it would have to be seen as just.

We are now learning in Obama's second term that we must see whole nations are too big to fail and that international law and human rights are undo restrictions on the free functioning of the unseen hand of the markets to set the value of even we human beings and our social order of things. Some are more valuable than others as the Palestinian people are learning.

Forget that the state of Israel was founded on just taking land from the Palestinian population and forcibly removing 750,000 people from what was rightfully theirs, the Palestinians have no right to defend themselves from the Israeli genocide and doing so is called terrorism. And in fact even Americans are learning Israels right to being too big to fail makes even criticizing Israel a crime while committing genocide is deemed an unfortunate but necessary right or rephrased in the insanity of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier's words we are angry that the Palestinians force us to kill their children. They must not love their children as much as we do.

What she was referring to was if the Palestinians loved their children as much as Israeli's did they would just willingly accept their second class status and enslavement in what used to be their land. Friedman's Free Market economic equation has no room for abstract reasoning such as I as a human being value freedom so much that I would rather die fighting for my rights than live and accept my enslavement. If behavior doesn't make a profit it must be unreasonable in the market analysis.

This is lost on most Americans as well who fail to grasp that our Minutemen were terrorists in our own definition of why Hamas is a terrorist organization. It also never seems to dawn on Americans that Hamas isn't some small group of people imposing their will on Gaza,they come from Gaza and are Gaza itself.

The interesting thing is technology, the entity that made global free trade a possibility, is also what is enabling people the world over to see through the lies and the propaganda of the US and much of the regular world media and to be horrified by the intentional killing of women and children and Israels defense that it is just defending itself.

We have learned from too big to fail the system is essentially criminal in and of itself and totally unjust so we must bring Israel to account ourselves through the BDS Movement. The loss of profit will bring corporations to abandon Israel's too big to fail status. Now if we could just bring ourselves to realize that we could pull this whole criminal enterprise down by boycotting the banks and refusing to pay credit card and student loan debt and in a debt strike too big to fail would be held accountable and repudiated altogether.

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Tim currently teaches History, Government and English at a private high school in Pennsylvania. He has a BA in History and Political Science from University of Iowa and his M.Ed. from Concordia University
Portland, Oregon. Tim has been active in union organizing in his work place and in environmental causes such as fracking.